


Beneath the Music from a Farther Room

by gellavonhamster



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Don't copy to another site, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Missing Scene, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, brief mentions of period-typical racism and homophobia, which period? that's the wrong question
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:14:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22117708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gellavonhamster/pseuds/gellavonhamster
Summary: An assortment of balls, masked and otherwise, hosted and/or attended by R, the Duchess of Winnipeg.
Relationships: Beatrice Baudelaire/The Duchess of Winnipeg, The Duchess of Winnipeg & Lemony Snicket, The Duchess of Winnipeg/Sally Sebald
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	Beneath the Music from a Farther Room

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Все эти утра, вечера и чаепитья](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22117609) by [gellavonhamster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gellavonhamster/pseuds/gellavonhamster). 



> title taken from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot

I.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that balls were part of her life as long as she could remember.

At first, of course, she didn’t take part in them. At first, she treaded carefully down the corridors barefoot on the shining cold parquet and soft carpet runners, trying not to make a sound, ready to flee at once to some corner as soon as any adult heaved into sight. Moving in quick, quick dashes down the stairs to the mezzanine, where the walls were lined with paintings and antique weapons and the flowerpots were crowding the space by the balustrade. She used to find a hideaway among the plants – a four-year old, she felt like a knight wandering in a fairy-tale forest among those rubber figs and palm-trees – and breathlessly observed the grownups in the hall below. One day, she would think, I won’t be sitting here anymore. I’ll go down to the hall too, in a long dress gleaming with all the colours of the rainbow and in elbow-length gloves. My face will be covered with a mask of feathers and lace but everyone will know it’s me because I’ll be the lady of the house, because they all will have come to present their compliments to me (she didn’t know such expressions back then, naturally, but she was already aware that one day she would become very, very important, and that awareness filled her with happiness and dread at the same time). Everyone will joke and have fun, and the waiters in white suit jackets will serve out champagne, and I will drink champagne too, and no one will forbid me to. And the music will be playing, and everyone will be dancing. For what’s the use dressing up and coming together if nobody’s dancing? 

She could have sat like that the whole night, staring at the dancing couples, but every time her disappearance was discovered quickly – far too quickly. The nanny would come – Nelly or Ellie, or perhaps Millie, some simple and sweet name. At one point, when Ramona was already grown-up, it occurred to her that the nanny could have quite possibly had some different name, but she, being a little kid, was allowed to call her by whatever name she could pronounce. Ramona did not remember Nelly’s, or Ellie’s, face, only the way her hands used to smell of jasmine because earlier she bathed Ramona and washed her with jasmine soap. The nanny used to take an already half-asleep Ramona out of her hiding-place, also trying to move as quietly as possible so as not to draw the attention of the people who had gathered below, and carry her back to the nursery, repeating that it was not allowed, miss, you’ve already been told the previous time, your mother won’t be happy. 

Ramona would put her head on the nanny’s shoulder, close her eyes, and see men in black tailcoats and women in sparkling veils, and behind her eyelids they would dance and dance and dance.

II.

Ramona was fifteen when she discovered that balls weren’t as much fun as they used to seem from the mezzanine.

She hadn’t been home for about four years and knew that she shouldn’t complain about that: she saw her family much more often than most of the other apprentices anyway. Every time she came home, she felt like the mansion had become smaller, as if after every time she left it was washed and shrunk. First and foremost, that must have been because she was growing (even at the time she was just a little shorter than her mother), but it also might have had something to do with the fact that since one evening in the garden a strange man grabbed her by her ankles and dragged her away from home, she had visited and seen a great many places. And even though hardly anywhere she encountered the same grandeur as at home, Ramona already knew that there were many old mansions in the world, many ballrooms with high ceilings and huge chandeliers, many winter gardens that looked like isles of jungle under a big crystal bowl. The air of magic that once enveloped her home had dissipated. It turned out that the lighting on the first floor was too bright, while on the second floor it was too dim, and that she didn’t even like half of the paintings hanging on the walls. 

It also turned out that balls were something completely mundane, and most people did not even really have fun there, just pretended they did. Ramona wove her way between the small groups of guests, nodding cordially to some of them, curtsying a little to the other, and pondered over how all these rich people had arrived here in all their finery not because they wanted to dance or converse, but because they had to discuss one deal or another, find a good match for their children, or suck up to her mother so that she would put in a word for them here and there or agree to finance some project. They made a show of laughing at each other’s jokes but there was no laughter in their eyes. They discussed the opening nights at the theatre, croquet, and politics, but mostly did it to form an opinion of their interlocutors and see if it appeared possible to use them somehow later. The women bore themselves ramrod straight and spoke in unnaturally high-pitched voices. The men uttered each phrase as if they were the only ones in the entire hall who possessed any critical thinking skills, and cast sticky glances at the women. Occasionally Ramona noticed some of them looking at her, which made her feel disgusted and, for some reason, ashamed. 

Even champagne was nasty! It was so sour, and made her stomach ache. Truth be told, the beer that she and Lemony and Beatrice sometimes bought using fake documents and drank straight from the bottle passing it around was more to her taste.

Suddenly, someone touched her arm.

“Hey,” a conspiratorial voice whispered right into her ear. “Are you all right?”

Speaking of Beatrice.

Ramona felt herself blush. Beatrice had always had a penchant for invading her friends’ personal space as long as they didn’t object, and the older they got, the more discomfort it posed to Ramona. Fair enough, the word ‘discomfort’ didn’t represent her feelings quite precisely. Part of her revelled in each embrace, each kiss on the cheek, each tangling of fingers. Part of her screamed that it was unbearable because if it kept on happening, Ramona would either fall victim to heart attack or do something that would ruin her friendship with Beatrice once and for all. Or her friendship with Lemony, who was so devotedly, stupidly, and awkwardly in love with Beatrice that it was hardly possible to surpass it. 

Just about as stupidly and awkwardly as Ramona was in love with her, too.

“I’m fine,” Ramona assured her. Beatrice frowned. Her long tight dress was sequined, making fabric look like scales, and her loose dark hair was interwoven with green and silver threads. That evening, she was a mermaid. “Not the kind of mermaid to give up her voice for a prince,” she declared to Ramona while Olaf’s parents were taking off their coats and Olaf himself looked over the entrance hall, his face bored and his hands in his pockets. “I’m a proper mermaid that drives the sailors mad with her singing and drags them underwater. Like that!” At this, she leaped at Olaf from the back. He yelled, “You piece of shit!” and tried to shake her off, and his father shouted at the both of them to calm down. Ramona laughed loudly then. Now she looked at how closely the mermaid dress fit Beatrice, her figure already much more feminine than Ramona’s, realized that many of those pompous old pigs must have been ogling her too, and felt an even more helpless kind of rage than when she caught them looking at herself. 

“Are you? You’ve got a long face. Are you having a headache?”

“No, it’s just that…” Ramona winced in frustration. She knew that if she tried to explain what was wrong, it would come out as some non-issue rubbish. “It’s so boring! Everyone’s pretending they’re enjoying themselves, but they actually aren’t. As a child, I used to come up there,” she gestured at the mezzanine with a nod, “every time my parents hosted a reception, used to sit there and dream of taking part in all this one day, but in practice…” 

“Nothing turned out to be the way you expected it,” Beatrice finished for her.

“Well, yeah.”

The orchestra started playing _The Blue Danube_. A smile lit up Beatrice’s face.

“You know what,” she spoke slowly. “If they don’t know how to have fun, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. Do you want to dance?”

“With you?” Ramona asked, confused. She was not sure if it was appropriate for two ladies to dance together when there were potential male partners galore. Not that even a single one of those partners appealed to her. 

“With me! I mean…” Beatrice looked a little shy, which was unusual for her, and suddenly Ramona wondered if Beatrice ever noticed the way Ramona blushes and freezes at her touch, if Beatrice assumed that Ramona must have started to feel burdened by her friendship for some reason. “If you want to, of course.” 

Ramona looked around. A number of couples went dancing, but there still were more of the guests who continued standing and discussing dull topics. A single look at them was enough to make her want to hang herself.

And here, against all that, was Beatrice. Bright and fearless Beatrice, who watched her questioningly, and the question seemed to be not only and not so much about the dance. 

Ramona thought about Lemony, but the first thing to cross her mind was the following: he wasn’t there.

“I do,” she said resolutely, and held out her hand to Beatrice. “Let’s show them how it’s done.”

They began to waltz, and for a short while, the magic that once had filled that hall came back. 

III.

It was curious how it went with scandals, both at the balls and in general. Scandals were not tolerated, yet at the same time they were desired. No one wanted to be caught in the middle of a scandal, but everyone enjoyed watching a scandal involving others. At the balls, scandals were a much more entertaining treat than the performances of the specially invited opera singers or the fireworks in the garden, but no one would dare to admit it out loud. 

That evening, the highlight of the ball organized by the Duchess of Winnipeg became her nineteen-year-old daughter, who had a quarrel with her mother in front of everybody – not a very heated quarrel, unfortunately, but still something – and who left the ballroom almost running to disappear on the second floor. 

Ramona knew her mother wouldn’t go looking for her anytime soon. She wouldn’t leave the guests for fear of losing her face to an even greater extent; at least one lady of the house ought to stay with them. Officially, Ramona was not the lady of that house yet, not at all, and she was not sure she’d be able to feel like one when the time came. Over the last few years, the ducal mansion had more than shrunk for her – it ceased to be her home. When she heard someone say ‘home’, she thought of a studio apartment she was renting in the City; it was small, but it was her own. And she barely ever thought of herself as of Ramona, the future Duchess of Winnipeg – only as of R, volunteer firefighter, part-time employee of the City Meteorological Centre, and journalist of _Daily Punctilio_. 

The quarrel started exactly with her mother reminding R who she was. At least that was the way it could have seemed to onlookers. In truth, the tension between them emerged already two days before, when R came home – or, rather, to her mother’s residence – for back then R was sincerely happy to finally see her, and allowed herself the kind of candour that was proven to be undue. 

“Father would have understood,” she thought wistfully, and pressed the handle of a heavy mahogany door. Clearly, she could not be sure about that. Father died of apoplexy when she was sixteen. Ramona had spent most of her life far from home and, frankly speaking, she knew neither of her parents well. Yet her father had always been gentler than her mother, listened more attentively, let her feel like just a girl (as far as any VFD member was able to feel like _just_ someone) more often than her mother did, and less often – like a heiress of an old family. Moreover, Father himself was an outlier of sorts in the high society: his family was new money, which was openly disdained by many aristocrats, and the only reason they concealed their disdain for his skin colour must have been the fact that racism and xenophobia had come to be considered bad form. Ramona was certain that many of them were hoping that would not last. 

With Father, it was… cosy. Calm. Ramona always used to miss him more than Mother, and she cried her eyes out when he passed away, hating herself for not being close to him at that moment. It was his study that Ramona came to when she happened to feel heavy-hearted during her rare visits to Winnipeg. Mother, in most respects practical, forbade changing anything in the study after Father’s death. Every day the help cleaned the dust off the books he would never reread, and off the paperweight and notebooks he would never use again. The telephone on the desk was not disconnected either. Ramona sat down in the armchair with her legs tucked under her, and spent some time sitting at the desk motionlessly, her face hidden in her palms. Then she moved the telephone closer to her, and dialled the number from memory. 

After the third dial tone, the answer followed.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mr. Snicket,” Ramona said. She didn’t hope it was not clear from her voice that she had been crying. To be honest, she was not planning to hide that. At least there was something she didn’t have to hide, and someone she didn’t have to hide it from. “Got a minute?”

“Even more than one,” Lemony replied. “How are you?”

“Everything sucks. How are you?”

“Better than could have been, I believe. What’s the matter? If you want to talk about it, of course.”

“L, why would I call you if I didn’t want to talk about it?”

“Sometimes having other people share silence with you is enough. Though this is obviously not an option for a phone call.”

“Obviously,” Ramona agreed. At the other end of the line, her best friend was waiting for her to tell what was plaguing her. She closed her eyes. “It’s no big deal, really. I had a row with _maman_. Too bad it happened right at the ball, though. We surely use our best efforts to entertain our dear guests, but not to such an extent.”

“She talked to you about marriage again, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Ramona gave a pull at the phone wire, wrapped it around her finger, and released it again. It was weird talking about all that, as it was always weird talking about her problems. She was rich, young – heck, she was good-looking, too, she had a lot of friends, and her childhood had been a tiniest bit more trouble-free than that of most of her volunteer peers. Complaining about her life meant admitting her weakness, just as running away from the ball nearly in tears did. “I know I am actually lucky. Take that boy, for instance, the one Kit is keeping in touch with, what’s his name…”

“Charles?”

“Right. She loves me, L, I know she does. She loves me as much as she can. She told me: I don’t care who you’re having affairs with, that’s just your business, but be so kind as to marry and to bear an heir because that’s the business of the entire duchy. But I don’t want to, you see?” She felt a lump in her throat again. She swallowed hard. “She never cared if I want this title, if I want to become her successor, if I want to join the VFD… I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to…” She stopped short, having caught herself thinking of a crazy thing yet again: what if the phones were being wiretapped? By their side of the Schism, or by the other one? “Can I do the thing I want to once in a lifetime? And could she not start this conversation in the midst of the ball? This time I wasn’t even bored! This time some of the guests even bothered to prepare full-scale fancy-dresses instead of throwing on the first mask they found and a regular evening dress!” 

“When you’re back in the City, we’ll host a ball on our own,” Lemony promised. “Everyone shall be wearing fancy-dresses. There will be live music featuring all instruments we find lying around. Ernest will mix some cocktails. Someone will puke from the balcony…” 

Ramona giggled.

“I would prefer to avoid the latter.”

“So would I, yet the experience shows that it is sadly impossible to guarantee the absence of this circumstance. By the way, I am totally serious. When are you coming back?”

“On Friday,” Ramona sighed. Two more days in the company of her mother awaited her. 

“Excellent. Then we’ll organize a soiree on Saturday. Beatrice and I shall take care of everything.”

“Poor, poor Mr. Snicket,” Ramona said and smiled. “Forced to socialize, sing, and dance for my sake.”

“I have given no promises related to singing,” Lemony pointed out.

“But you’ll have to,” she grinned. She still wanted to cry, but she also wanted to smile. At that moment, in the study still smelling faintly of her father’s cologne, with her friend’s voice on the phone, she felt invincible. “Now tell me what’s new at the office.”

IV.

They must have really thrown a party upon her arrival then. As the years went by, all parties with other volunteers blended in her memory, making up a single endless one. Not the Groundhog Day – more like the Groundhog Night. It was not often that they could gather everyone they wanted to meet in the same place, so when such an opportunity presented itself, they went wild. They used to drink a lot back then, because every single one of them must have already had something they wanted to forget entirely. Ramona suspected that some of them didn’t stop at drinking – it would have been naïve to expect that, taking into account that some departments of their organization experimented with cultivation and use of hallucinogenic mushrooms – but she was not interested in such amusements. Alcohol was enough for her – that, and Father’s old pipe, the only thing she smoked. Besides, in a good company it seemed that even air itself was intoxicating, making one laugh and speak too loudly and do stupid yet harmless things. 

And they did have a good company. God, how she loved all of them – not everyone the same, naturally, but each of them at least a bit. The ducal mansion with its jungles of rubber figs and its bad lighting receded into the past, surrendered the title of her home, and passed it not so much to her apartment in the City as to the people she used to spend time with. The balls in the hall with high ceilings paled in comparison to the parties in rented apartments, occasionally at the headquarters, at times – in some shady abandoned buildings. Oh, they were a damn good company indeed, with their shared memories and shared secrets, their diverse talents and confusing relationships. The Bloomsbury Group with daggers under their coats. The Bright Young Things with tattoos on their ankles. 

There was a moment that stuck in her mind clearly: it was a very warm May, the smell of bird cherry was hanging in the air, and it was about half past two in the morning. She and Lemony were smoking on the balcony of Monty and Bertrand’s apartment. More precisely, she was smoking Father’s pipe (no matter how many years passed, she always kept thinking of it as of her father’s pipe not her own) while Lemony was standing by and looking at the few stars that were visible in the City. Back then, he didn’t smoke yet – back then, not enough had already happened to make him start smoking, although at times, when someone would mention a town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea, his face would look like he had already seen everything he could in this life, and much more than he ever wished to. The music was already muffled, replaced by conversations. R was feeling dreadfully tired and at the same time full of energy. She wanted to sleep, but she also wanted to dance some more. 

“Do you realize that right now, by the way, we’re living the best years of our lives?” she asked Lemony, and he turned around to glance into the room where their friends were. One of the Denouement brothers, Gustav, and Sally were discussing something on the couch, pouring wine from the last remaining bottle into the glasses. Ike and Josephine, who was basically hanging on his neck, were talking about something with Jacques in the doorway. A group consisting of the second Denouement, Monty, and Widdershins were having some lively discussion in the other corner of the room. Olivia was doing a Tarot reading for a drowsily blinking Hector. Bertrand and Beatrice were the only ones still dancing – at the very centre of the room, very slowly, not so much actually dancing as swaying in each other’s arms. Kit, Olaf, Haruki, and Gregor were not in sight; some of them must have been in the kitchen and some in the bathroom. It has been a long time since they’d gathered in such large numbers, and suddenly R thought “And we won’t anymore”, and felt a shiver running down her spine. 

“Yes,” Lemony replied pensively. Then the same thought that scared her must have crossed his mind too, because he added, “What shall we do when they’re over?” 

She didn’t know the answer to that question then, and later, when those best years were left behind and their company got scattered across the country and on the opposite sides of the barricades, she didn’t know it all the more.

V.

Some things did not change as time went by. The sun kept shining, water was wet, and there were balls being held regularly at the mansion of the Dukes of Winnipeg – the balls that all the neighbourhood elite assembled at and even guests from abroad arrived to, and if one Duchess was replaced by another, that did not mean a discontinuation of the tradition at all. The balls continued to be organized, remaining, as before, a pretty screen to cover the making of deals, hunting for future spouses, striking up an acquaintance with the right people, and, since the title of the Duchess was passed on to Ramona, some other business that half of the guests had no clue about. The other half, which made use of the cluelessness of that one, was the members of the same secret society as the hostess of the party. 

The last ball organized by Ramona was marked by an arrest.

Barons and bankers, philanthropists and politicians were staring indignantly, though also with an ill-concealed curiosity, at a man dressed as a bullfighter and at the two policemen holding him down. Two more policemen were standing by. One of them was wearing large sunglasses, which looked absurd even among the people dressed in the most fanciful costumes possible. That was taken much more seriously now than during the times of the previous Duchess, when it used to be enough just to add a half-mask to a regular suit or dress. The current Duchess appreciated creativity, art, and showmanship. 

The current Duchess was standing in front of the policemen, a folded fan clasped in her hands.

“Your Grace,” said the inspector, pulling the mask off the person under arrest. “Do you recognize this man?”

She wanted to say yes I do, how could I not recognize him if we first met when we were four years old and have been best friends ever since? What are you doing, let him go immediately, all the accusations against him are fabricated and we can prove it, does it matter who ‘we’ are, soon you’ll know. The real criminal might still be here in the building, he tried to kill the man you’ve captured, he tried to kill the woman this man came to see, he killed her husband, he tried to marry her underage daughter, you got the wrong guy! Let him go immediately and go catch the real one while he hadn’t disappeared into the night! 

Lemony Snicket – tired, pale, with a black eye, and a dark drop of blood dried on his lip – met her gaze and shook his head subtly.

“No,” said Ramona, the Duchess of Winnipeg. She did not wince, it was only that her fingers clutched the fan more tightly – it even seemed to her that it cracked. “It’s the first time I see this man.”

“It follows that he arrived to your party without an invitation.”

“It follows that he did.”

“So you deny that this person is Lemony Snicket?”

“Lemony Snicket is dead. I went to his funeral. With all due respect, Inspector,” she let herself smile – benevolently, yet condescendingly, “I’m afraid you are on the wrong track.”

“A further investigation shall indicate whether the track was wrong or not, Your Grace,” Inspector replied. He also let himself smile – respectfully, yet without bothering to hide that he thought her in the wrong. “James, Prescott, search the building. Madison,” he told the officer in sunglasses, “take the suspect away.”

“Yes, Sir,” the officer replied. He handcuffed Lemony and escorted him to the exit. Having walked a considerable distance, the policeman suddenly turned around. He took off his glasses, and Ramona grew cold: she recognized him as one of the volunteers whose photos she was shown a while ago by poor Gustav. It was one of those who had recently defected to the fire-starting side.

Everything, all and everything was going down the tubes.

She saw Mother in her mind’s eye – impeccably looking, regal, calm and icy as ever. It was not that R had never loved her; she just couldn’t find anything in common with her. R didn’t mourn her the way she had mourned her father; she just could not sleep for many nights in a row after her death. R would have given anything for her mother to be there at that moment. 

Compose yourself, Mother said in her head. You are facing a problem, so solve it. And make sure everything is proper, I beg you.

Ramona, the Duchess of Winnipeg, took a deep breath and smiled.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began. “Due to obvious circumstances I am bound to proclaim this evening’s party to be over…”

VI.

“And who’s that?” the girl asked, tapping with a tip of her finger on a cheery young face in a black-and-white picture. The girl’s name was Beatrice Baudelaire, and Ramona kept telling herself that one day she would get used to it. Used to the name of a dead woman that meant so much to her becoming someone else’s. No, it did not rub her the wrong way at all, there was no feeling that this Beatrice was a pretender. It is only in the days of one’s childhood and youth that the whole world seems to be your story only, yours and that of the people surrounding you. As a forty-something you see that you are just one of the multitude of equally background characters, and that there are hundreds and thousands of people sharing your name, your habits, your wounds, and your pain. 

She took a closer look at the face that Beatrice was pointing at.

“Oh, that’s Monty. Dr. Montgomery. He was in some of the previous pictures, remember?”

“That’s him? I didn’t recognize him without the moustache.”

“He must be about seventeen here. He didn’t have a moustache then yet,” Ramona smiled nostalgically, looking at the photograph, and through the years young Monty returned her a smile frozen for eternity. She still missed him. There were a lot of people she still missed. “He stopped shaving it… at nineteen, probably. By the time he was twenty, he already had his legendary snake moustache. We keep meaning to put the photos in the right order but we just can’t get around to it.” 

Technically, all photos in the album belonged to Sally. The only surviving pictures from R’s personal photo archive were the ones that Olaf enclosed with the letter he made her write as he was pressing her own grandfather’s hunting knife to her throat. “Snicket escaped from the cop shop,” he told her then. Beatrice – that other Beatrice, Beatrice-in-italics – died that night, really died that time, and there seemed to be tears in his eyes though he would have definitely killed Ramona if she so much as mentioned that. “So we’ll lure him over here.” His plan fell through: he underestimated both her inventiveness in terms of experimenting with VFD codes and her hand-to-hand combat skills. Still, the letter reached Lemony together with the photographs, which he gave to his niece, Beatrice the Second, years later. Ramona had already decided to give her a couple more photos that Beatrice would find the most interesting – for example, those of her mother as a child, or of her uncle Jacques, but first they had to wait for Sally to ask which photos it was all right to give away, and Sally was to be back only the day after. 

“I take photographs, too,” Beatrice told her, a little shy. “Would you allow me to make a portrait of you, Your Grace?”

“Sure. And please call me Ramona. Or Aunt Ramona, if you wish,” R winked at her.

Beatrice beamed with joy.

“Okay, Aunt Ramona. I was thinking I could take a picture of you in the yard, among the trees.”

“Do not forget that the landscape in the photo must not be easily recognizable, Beatrice,” Lemony commented. He was sitting in an armchair facing them, with a heap of newspapers in his lap. In each paper, R had underlined the headlines and even individual sentences in some articles that she thought to be possible clues in the search for the Baudelaires. “Otherwise, if the pictures get into the wrong hands…”

“Snicket, I am begging you,” Ramona waved him aside. “This kind of trees grows all over the country.”

“No, Mr. Snicket’s right,” Beatrice joined in. “If we take the photo in the yard, then walls or windows or something might get into the frame. We could find some place nearby with no buildings.”

“We will,” Ramona promised, and gripped the girl’s shoulder briefly and lightly. ‘Listen, you stay here for a while, and your uncle and I shall go fetch something, all right? If you have any questions about any other photos, just bookmark the page, and I’ll explain everything when I’m back.”

“Okay,” the girl nodded.

“Great. Snicket, let’s go.”

“Please don’t hit me,” Lemony asked nonchalantly, putting the papers aside. Beatrice giggled, and Lemony smiled a little – faintly, with the very corner of his lips. 

“Does she still call you ‘Mr. Snicket’?” Ramona asked him quietly as soon as they went out into the hallway. Lemony shrugged.

“We met relatively recently,” he remarked. “I am not going to hurry her, especially since it has no crucial significance for me how she calls me.” 

Liar, Ramona thought. It was literally yesterday that Beatrice met her, and she had no difficulty switching to calling her ‘Aunt’. On the other hand, there was a difference between simply addressing a person in a less official manner and completely accepting a relative who had been evading contact purposefully and for a long time. Lemony was right not to hurry her. The important thing was that they were together. 

“If you say so,” Ramona opened the door leading to her and Sally’s bedroom. Their house had nothing on the mansion of the Dukes of Winnipeg that was destroyed by the fire; it was humble, not too spacious, and they got it in such condition that they were already thinking of doing some renovation even though they had only lived in it for a little more than a month. Ramona adored it. “Come in, I have a gift for you.” 

“A gift?” Lemony asked. The gift was in plain view – on a stool by the bed, so Lemony noticed it as soon as he peered into the room, and rolled his eyes as if in disapproval, yet clearly only pretending to be dissatisfied. “R, you shouldn’t have…” 

“I should,” she interrupted him. “I do not have that many friends left, you know, and you had just mentioned that your favourite accordion had drowned in a swamp. By the way, how did it happen?” 

“It’s a long story. I can tell you over dinner, if you’d like,” Lemony ran his fingers over the keys. When he touched musical instruments, his face always became distant and dreamy, as if he was already hearing the music that could be extracted from them. “Really, R, I am grateful to you, but I won’t be able to carry it with me all the time, and we don’t stay anywhere for long these days…” 

“Then let it stay here, and you’ll play it when you visit us,” Ramona shrugged. “I am so used to having a whole room full of your stuff close at hand that I feel a little lonely without it.”

“A room for me and a room for Beatrice,” Lemony said, smiling into nowhere. “How long ago that was.”

“So long ago,” she agreed. “We have become museum pieces, Mr. Snicket.”

“Not you, Your Grace. You are alive.”

“So are you,” she reminded him. “Don’t forget it, would you? At least for me. And for her,” she nodded in the direction of the door, of the hallway leading to the room where a living Beatrice Baudelaire was looking at the photos of the people who were long gone.

He kissed her on the forehead – a chaste, brotherly kiss.

“I’ll try to,” he said softly.

They brought the accordion to the living room, and Beatrice put the album aside and ran her hand over the shining lacquered side of the instrument, enraptured. 

“Once I used to have a great big house, almost a castle,” Ramona told her, “and I used to give balls there for my acquaintances and associates like my mother before me, and before her my grandmother, and so all the way down to our ancestors who moved here from France.” 

Beatrice nodded.

“Mr. Snicket told me about this.”

“What do you think of giving a ball, Beatrice? A really small one, for our own circle. Tomorrow, my wife will be back,” she smiled, feeling the usual mad happiness at the possibility to say this word, _‘wife’_. “It will be a surprise for her.”

The girl’s eyes lit up.

“But how do we prepare?”

“I believe we have everything we might need. There are some bottles of wine and lemonade in the cellar, and an ice cream cake in the fridge. As to the music, we have your uncle with his new accordion, and there’s also Sally’s and my record collection. Do you know how to dance, Beatrice?”

“I am not so good at it, to be honest.”

“I shall teach you,” Ramona promised, and took the girl’s hand. “Mr. Snicket, would you play something for us?”

The stately columns and the crystal chandeliers, the palm-tree pots and the carpet runners – all of that belonged to the past now. The present was hard-won, fragile, but despite that, or maybe for that very reason, it was lovely. 

The future was unpredictable – save for one thing, perhaps: there would certainly be dancing. 


End file.
